


Oracle Bones

by togina



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Implied Torture, M/M, Modern Era, Soviet Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-07
Updated: 2012-03-07
Packaged: 2017-11-01 14:52:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/358079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier is a tool, as well-examined and carefully-honed as any other. But that doesn't explain the dreaming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oracle Bones

**Author's Note:**

> This occurs mostly at some unspecified point where the Winter Soldier goes missing in New York. Steve and Bucky's history is pulled from the movie, and all mistakes can be attributed to the author's lack of knowledge about the comics and/or time periods.

Blond. That was the word in English. Hair that was yellow – but not yellow like Izavov's, who had hair that gave off the same sickly gleam as their lights. Yellow like wheat during a drought. That was the year they sent him to Canada, to take care of a problem hiding in the bunker below a farmhouse. Wheat everywhere, bleached and drying to dead husks that crumbled under his boots. Blond.

 

He scratched the word into the metal at the base of his hand, where the wrist joint overlapped and no one could see. He was running out of space there, 'blond' wedged beneath 'freckle' and cascading into 'blue'. Freckle was one of his favorites: it rhymed with speckle, hundreds of little dots scattered over nose and cheeks, across shoulders and down the soft range of spine. 'Blue' still made him frown. It was too small a word for eyes wide as a summer sky or darker than a storm in the North Atlantic, the color of tattered, starry clothing or the center of a glacier. There had to be another word that his mind wouldn't grant him, like the 'good' he had etched in with a stolen shard of crystal and then tried to rub away. There must be a word for someone who carried an old woman's basket and pulled men from dark and fiery places, but they wouldn't tell him what it was. Not in French or German, Japanese or Ukrainian, Portuguese or Arabic. He'd woken up once with 'kind' on his tongue, but when he asked they told him 'kind' meant child.

 

His mind was a forest at night, where roads ended in shadows and eyes glinted in the torchlight. They had cut new ways and he followed them, but sometimes he could see the faint, trodden lines of an overgrown path. He was an excellent tracker, after all, though he didn't know if that was something they'd taught him, or something from Before. Before, with freckles and blond and blue. They didn't know that he dreamed when they put him away. Like all their weapons he was silent, quick to draw, and cold to the touch. There was no reason to accuse a rifle of thinking. Sometimes he dreamed of Now: night and quiet and panther-soft, the snap of bones and the bright flash of lightning from his hand, the flooding black of terror against the veined white of eyes. Sometimes he couldn't tell when he was: there were alleys and blood, guns and pain radiating outward from veins, languages sliding through his mind like water until he woke unable to wrest one babble from another. The blond man could have spoken Czech or Cantonese or Spanish. There was no way to know without asking, of course, and he was not going to lead them down this path. If he did, he knew it would be gone the next time, just the hard lines of their road and no dreams. Some things he knew, though the woman said otherwise.

 

The woman – red and black, sharp and chilly as the knife strapped into his boot, or the ones he could curl from his fingers – was only a student. Or a test. They were all tests. She came to his bed, when he had one. He knew not to let her mouth and all of its crevices near his, to keep one hand free in case it became necessary to bring her head sharply around. She did not stay, and she left nothing behind. She had asked him once why 'art' was scarred above his knee. He didn't answer, and she laughed. What she did not know was that he couldn't answer – they had noticed it when they put him away, and now he had the word but nothing besides the bright, starburst of pain bubbling from needles under his skin, the careful tug of a blade under each fingernail. Art.

 

He was more careful now, though he did not turn the woman away. That would have been unwise. They handed him directions for a new mission and sent him away on clear cut land through a forest, and he took their road without speaking of the path it overlaid. The cargo hold of a plane – perhaps this was how it felt when they put him away and he didn't dream, frozen and airless – deposited him into a city half rebuilt. Not their half. The buildings, yes, but he had been over the wall and seen towers built to beautify instead of tame. His arm was sheathed in flawless, pale skin and no one looked twice when he passed by. They had tests of their own, and it did not pay to stare at a man who walked without fear.

 

Over the wall again. (Not because it was necessary, but because it pleased them to put their weapon through its paces.) Security had grown laxer: it took only one guard, gone before he could do more than gasp in fear. _I am not your worst nightmare_ , he thought as he lowered the man down, lifted the foreign money and cigarettes from his pocket. _I am not the one who would come for you if they found these, the room where they would flay the skin from your feet._ The guard would keep his medals. His grave would be marked, his name publicly mourned. _I am not the one who steals names._ He closed the man's eyes and leapt deftly into Europe.

 

There was another plane – air travel had improved since his last flight, though the stewardess' American accent stained her French. She was from Brooklyn, he learned while she was perched on the edge of a sink, dress bunched around her waist and stiff curls in disarray. She would be taking a week off when they arrived, to visit her mother. He also learned where they kept the list of passengers and when they served the champagne. Both the list and the sweaty, reddened face matched the dossier he'd memorized. The sleeping mask was an added benefit; no one dared disturb a wealthy man who slept like the dead. Everyone had disembarked before he heard the stewardess shriek and the ambulance tear over the tarmac. His name might come up, but he had borrowed it from someone else's pocket.

 

He didn't begin glancing at his arm until the buildings came into view, squat delis and shops usurped by a skyline of bridges and spires. He'd seen it before. They'd shown him pictures, delineated maps. None of that had made him want to peel the skin from his arm and trace his fingers over the 'f' in freckle or the crooked 'e' in blue.

 

The cab driver glanced at him, still talking, but he recognized the studied tilt of the head, the hand twitching toward something hidden next to him. Test. _Never do the same thing twice_ , he explained softly in Russian, and left the test in the trunk when he let himself out when the land ended. They wouldn't like it, but they knew not to follow him. One shouldn't step into the path of their own weapon.

 

The bridge was not in the dossier but he started up it anyway, boots crunching on the ice. His footsteps echoed in the silence. Icy wind blew down the river and into his numbing ears, clouds scudding over the night sky. The sound of ferry horns intermingled with the rumble of the trains. He leaned against frozen stones and stared at the frail, blond boy puffing white bursts of steam into the winter dark, wrapped in a coat that draped past his knees and swallowed his chin and the bottom of his large ears. There was a coat-less, dark boy beside the first, but his hair didn't reflect light like the smaller boy's. He watched, and the thin one unfolded his arms and leaned forward, cheeks glowing pink in the cold. There were no freckles visible, and the gentle hand that tugged the coat collar up nearly knocked the boy over. Yet he knew this reed of a child would become the giant of a man etched below his skin. A gust of wind stung his eyes, and when he finished blinking the boy was gone.

 

The streets looked exactly like their pictures, and only slightly resembled the moments hovering at the edges of his vision. There was the boy, no higher than the pile of garbage beside him in the alley, miniscule fists clenched and blood dripping from his chin. There was a young man, all legs and arms dangling from a fire escape, his face reddening as the dark boy pounded on his back, urging him to breathe. There he was in the hallway to the apartment in the dossier, spindly legs bent to hold up a sketch pad. _Art_. Metal fingers probed at the old scar, slotting it back into place.

 

He had stripped the skin off days before, shattered their radio device to reach the crystal at its center. Nothing else would gouge into the adamantine limb. The words tumbled down the length of his arm now: slim, quick, fierce, artist, wings – because he had no word for shoulder blades that folded out in tapering points – asthma, broken tooth. They had begun to topple into sentences, laughter that made blue eyes sparkle like northern lakes, ice melted by the sun.

 

It took longer for the young man to fade from the corridor; he could almost reach out and peer at his drawing, brush cool fingers over his hand. When the image was gone he turned and walked out of the building, a weapon dreaming. If he went back they would take this away from him: they _had_ taken this away, the long fingers with knobby knuckles, the small, pointed nose that bled without warning, the missing toe on the far side of his left foot.

 

He was searching for space to write about the foot when he dropped the crystal. It made a series of faint clinks as it glimmered down the rusted ladders and into the alley trash. He could still see it, of course. There had been more difficult tests than diamond-hunting. He twisted to rise, a muscle in his back protesting. The ledge was six floors up, and nothing was familiar because nothing would be, but he knew this place in the wild corners of his mind. Then he glanced up and saw him: blond hair flattened one side and pulled straight up on the other, mouth red around his chapped lips. The boy was leaning out the window, smiling like a loon. At him, if he didn't glance at the dark boy smoking beside him.

 

“Come back to bed,” the image said, voiceless, and the phantom beside him hid its grin in an exhale of smoke as it stood. “Steve,” it responded, before the blond boy tugged the cigarette away to make room for his mouth. Steve. Steve. He stared for a full minute before scrambling for the crystal he didn't have, knocking the preoccupied boys aside. Steve. His _name_.

 

He was rising to get the diamond as she came around the corner, red and black and eyes glittering when she spotted him in her web. There wouldn't be time, then, and he'd failed this test. She was too close and he had nothing that would cut through his metal arm – but he had another arm. Steve. He managed to tuck the first half into his skin, ragged under the steel edge of his nails, before she shot him. Then he looked again and blanched. She told them it was from blood loss, because she didn't know how much there was to lose. Neither did he, by the time they fit the new arm. They let him scream for a time, until 'blue' meant the murky color of a serum, and there was nothing but the pure blankness of pain. Then he slept, and didn't dream.

 

~*~

 

When he woke, he was screaming. It was dark and he was pinned down and someone was murmuring in English. He blinked and there was the blond man and a bruising eye and it all came rushing back, name after name. He was James – Sergeant Barnes, the Winter Soldier – and that was Steve, who must have forgotten which arm to grab first, given the black eye.

 

When he stopped struggling Steve shifted his weight mostly onto the metal arm, though he continued muttering, “Shh, shh, it's all right, it's okay.”

 

He dropped his head onto his right hand, rubbing the left over the wrist it had encircled. “Bucky, why won't you talk to me?” he said finally, voice a low burr against the midnight growl of the garbage trucks. Steve's eyes were dark, and his hair reflected silver at night. He filed these moments into his mind, across the retinas of his eyes. The smell of sweat and unfamiliar soap, the faint hint of detergent from the sheets. The lights glittering over broad shoulders, the muscles of the thigh wedged under a scarred knee. The way he said, “Bucky,” and didn't flinch when approached from behind, like the Avengers did.

 

“I just – you just -” He hoped that someone had recorded Captain America in this world, filmed him so that this time when they took everything Steve's voice would be there, even if it wouldn't be humming beneath his skin the way it was now. “- you're not the only one with nightmares.”

 

He jerked away, because there was concern there. He knew Steve's nightmares – had watched his face as he tried to catch a boy long fallen – and there could be no empathy. He was waiting for them to take everything away again. Some things were best forgotten, after all. And there was so much that Steve didn't know. He already knew about the killing and the pain and it would only make wide eyes crease at the corners if he learned about the tangled, shattered pieces that would not come together, no matter how hard he grasped for it. He was waiting for them to take it away, to redraw a map that he could follow. To make him forget how much there was to lose.

 

He didn't shift his arm, but Steve caught it anyway, raising it up to see in the light filtering through the curtains. “What's 'ctn'?” he wondered, voice still hushed, but angry. “Did they do this to you? Is this some sort of -”

 

“-serial number?” He attempted to pull his hand away, but Captain America's obstinacy matched his heft. “I was a Soviet assassin, Steve -” he gave up and swung his head around to watch patterns of light dance on the sterile wall of the guest room “- not a prisoner.”

 

Steve opened his mouth to argue before his mind drew even with his obdurance. “Wait, it's Cyrillic, isn't it? Ss-t- is that 'e'? Sstee . . .” The fingers around his wrist clamped down as Steve's breath hitched. “That's – it's . . . Bucky, what _happened_?”

 

He couldn't take it: not the concern, not the horror under freckled cheeks and bruised eyes. Not for him. “I forgot! I forgot and then I remembered only it wasn't enough and you were just some naked kid in a window and I had everything and then they took this, too, because it isn't even your _name_ -”

 

Then Steve's lips were pressed over his, and long fingers were digging into his scalp and neither of his hands were free. “I won't let them near you again. Bucky, I promise I won't let them have you.”  And it was supposed to be Bucky saying that, not Steve, looking staunch and fierce and all of those words that had lived under fragile skin.

 

"Come to bed," Bucky answered, and it was backwards and there were no fire escapes or cigarettes or innocence, but Steve still smiled and dove down to kiss him. They couldn't take this away from him. They couldn't take this.


End file.
